Songs Of Our Grandfathers
Over the course of five albums and a little more than a decade, Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller have developed an inspired union of two disparate yet surprisingly compatible musical styles: bluegrass and klezmer. (Their musical journey is detailed in the May 2023 issue of BU.)
Bluegrass, of course, needs no explanation here, and klezmer really shouldn’t either. Like bluegrass, it has deep roots, involves a fair amount of improv and has had a significant impact on the American musical mainstream.
This timely and heartfelt tribute salutes Weinstein’s and Miller’s respective grandfathers, musicians who have had a profound influence on their grandchildren. Zoe’s grandfather, David, was a Philadelphia-based klezmer musician who immigrated from the Ukraine relatively early in the 20th century. By way of her mother (also a musician) Zoe inherited David’s musical notebooks. She’s drawn extensively from them for this project.
A pair of tunes here—“Bulgar Sigansky” and “Klezmer Clave Medley”— came from those notebooks. The swingy “Bei Mir Bitsu Sheyn” is a klezmer standard that the famed Andrews Sisters anglicized and popularized worldwide back in the 1930s as “To Me You Are Beautiful.” Zoe and Cloyd restored the song’s original Yiddish lyrics. In the studio, the band, which includes long-time sidekicks Bennett Sullivan (banjo and guitar) and Kevin Kehrberg (bass), along with special guest Andy Statman on mandolin and klezmer clarinet, laid down a swirling “klezgrass” accompaniment.
Miller’s North Carolina-born grandfather, Jim Shumate, was a celebrated fiddle player who was front and center during the formative mid-to-late 1940s era of bluegrass. He was a member of both Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys and Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys. Later in life, Shumate made some noteworthy solo recordings, including The Jim Shumate Collection (1999) and Bluegrass Fiddle Supreme, recorded in 1980 with the Blue River Boys.
Zoe & Cloyd’s update of “Up and At ‘Em,” a Shumate original that he recorded in the 1990s, features an eerie minor-key klezmer intro that breaks into a rousing bluegrass breakdown.
“Rainbow of My Dreams” is a sweet reprise of a Tommy Scott original that Shumate performed with Flatt & Scruggs and continued to play throughout his life. There’s also a fine rendition of Bill Monroe’s “Rocky Road Blues,” which Shumate performed with Monroe many times. Then there’s the evocative gospel ode, “Old Country Baptizing,” a Shumate composition that was recorded by Bill Monroe and, later, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.
This of course is just a sampling of this timely, historically meaningful and masterfully executed project.
